Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added PowerShell to the management options for its cloud, in a move that reaches out to the Windows community.

Part of Amazon's Microsoft push is to let developers and administrators manage their AWS services in a way that's natural to them, according to the company.

AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell provide over 550 so-called cmdlets for allowing administrators to make service calls or create scripts for automating cloud management, all from within the command line-based PowerShell environment. A cmdlet is a lightweight command that is used in PowerShell.

While Amazon is making it easier to run Windows in its cloud, Microsoft has also quietly started to support Linux on its Azure cloud. But at some point it might try to target that part of the market more aggressively, according to Nebuloni.

The share of Windows deployments on Amazon's cloud is still relatively small compared to the number of Linux servers, Nebuloni said.